1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a recording apparatus that records a broadcast-video signal of a broadcast program, a method for controlling it, and an information recording medium for recording control.
2. Related Art
As a prior recording apparatus, there is a recording apparatus as disclosed reference (Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. H9-35411) that compresses the video signal and audio signal of a broadcast program as compressed data and records that data on the recording apparatus continuously over a specified period of time for a television channel pre-set by the user without having a recording instruction from the user for each program. With this recording apparatus, when reproducing the data, the compressed data is read from the recording apparatus and expanded, making it possible to continuously or selectively view various broadcast programs over the specified time.
Also, in Reference (EP 0936811B1) a recording apparatus is disclosed that is provided with two kinds of storage units; for example, a first storage unit is a hard disc unit that stores broadcast program data in FIFO (First In First Out) format, and a second storage unit is an optical-disc unit that stores specified image data after that specified image data is detected from the image data stored in the first storage unit are known.
In the prior recording apparatuses there was a technique of constantly recording broadcast programs, and performing time-division multiplexing of the video signals and audio signals of a plurality of channels to record them in one memory apparatus.
However, since the data is recorded in a memory apparatus such as the hard disc in the recording apparatus using the ring-buffer method, when recording is performed until the memory capacity of that memory apparatus becomes full, the first recoded programs are deleted and new programs are recoded in that deleted space. Therefore, it is desirable that recording is efficiently performed by the recording apparatus even after the storage apparatus reaches its capacity.